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I'm Mary - published author, teacher, daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend, and colleague living in rural upstate New York...and as you can probably tell, I'm also a necessary practitioner of multi-tasking!

All the details about why I have this website are in my "Welcome" message at the top of the Home page (along with links to further information, also reached through the menu above ), so I will only add here that I'm glad you found me! Thanks for visiting. Please consider joining my "blog family" by clicking one of the "follow" buttons below, won't you? I look forward to getting to know you better.

“Food For The Muse”

This blog post was inspired through a post written by fellow writer and blog-o-sphere comrade L. N. Holmes at her excellent blog A Vase of Wildflowers. You can check out her blog through the link of its title, or read the specific and wonderful blog post that inspired me here.

Anyway, it got me thinking about how important music is to my creativity, particularly in the crafting of characterization and the scenes I need to write to showcase some of the character issues and development I need to show.

Like many writers, listening to music is an integral part of my writing process. I almost always need music to brainstorm. I have to tease the Muse out, especially with the way my life is so cram-packed and highly disjointed with all the different hats I have to wear. I need a trigger to get me into the work as quickly as possible to maximize what little time I have to brainstorm and/or write.

You may have heard of authors who develop “playlists” for each book they write. I’m not so organized that I actually create a playlist, but I do have a group of songs that seems to serve as the background music for each book. It always sounds a little cheesy to me, though, when authors post their “playlists”, because what it means and how it triggers that author is not necessarily how those songs strike a particular reader.

It makes me vaguely uncomfortable because writing in and of itself is such an intimate process, and using music as inspiration adds a layer to that, IMHO. To me, it’s akin to opening the basement door and inviting readers to mosey around in the stuff you’ve got hoarded down there…all your quirky, sometimes a little tarnished, or even embarrassing things you’ve collected that don’t mean much to anyone else but that give youthat necessary jolt of emotion you need to write a particular mood, scene, or character. 🙂

So I’m only going to open mine a crack…but only because this song was unusual in the way it informed my Muse, as it didn’t just inspire a mood or character element for me. It actually caused an entire scene to bloom, full-formed, into my mind.

The Crimson Lady, originally released in 2003 and re-released in 2012

Such things don’t happen too often to me as a writer. The last time I can remember an entire anything springing into my mind from an outside source was when I was trying to come up with the basic plot/character in what ended up being my third published romance The Crimson Lady. Her character came to me like that, fully-formed. So much so that I could see her in my mind and hear her speaking. It happened after I watched a television program about third world prostitution (and no, that’s not what the book is about)…but that will have to be the topic of another post. 🙂

This current one happened when I was nearing the end of writing Moose Tracks on the Road To Heaven. I hadn’t realized I needed it until it came to me. The scene begins on page 198 of the book, for those who might want to look it up, once it’s published in EIGHT DAYS!! ( it’s not a chapter, but a “past” scene dated April 15 1987). The song is “When a Heart Breaks” by Ben Rector. You can have a listen below, if you’re so inclined. It might give you an idea about the tone and mood of the scene, but I can’t give you too many details without giving a major spoiler for the book. 🙂

Anyway, it was a perfect scene for what I needed to convey, but had no idea how until that moment. I went home and wrote the entire scene in about an hour. Except for a few edits, what you see is how it came out of my subconscious mind…all thanks to the music that gave my Muse a shot of adrenaline.